I've had two interesting things happen to friends computers over the past few months.

First I got an email from my friends at Tin Roof (by the way, if you want to support a great charity... this is it) telling me that she needed to file an extension on her taxes before she leaves for Nicaragua on Tuesday. However when she started Turbo Tax she was getting an error.

Further investigation by me (via a VNC connection I set up with her a while ago) realized that this was a .NET error.

Turbo Tax spit out the following error: 20888 39915.  A Quick search of their site gave this article.  Basically blaming .NET and their solution has a link to a program that totally wipes out .NET from your system so you can start over.  I downloaded the program, ran it and then reinstalled .NET and her problem was fixed (well after I ran a reboot.bat file that was in the Turbo Tax installation folder, but that's another issue all together).

Then I have another buddy who had been using a program I wrote for my church to transfer files between members of the multimedia team.  Several months ago a basic Windows component of it stopped working right.  I was at a total loss for a solution (as a simple uninstall and reinstall of .NET didn't help).  I let it drop... but I emailed him today with this fix and my hunch is, that this will get him up and running again.

What frustrates me the most about this, is that Microsoft's .NET uninstall doesn't fully uninstall itself.  Many years ago I did some work for Lexmark's All in One printers and one of the BIG things they did was make sure that their uninstall completely wipes out any record of the machine being on your system.  And really there is no excuse for any other behavior.

Many times when programming in .NET you need your DateTime variable to display in various formats:

08/22/2006
Tuesday, 22 August 2006
etc...

This is thankfully made pretty trivial with the ToString() function.  Just pass in the appropriate format string and you will get what you need.

You can find a great list of these here.

Well this post is somewhat an archive for me in case it returns, but it may help somebody else.

Occasionally when I click external shortcuts on my system I will get the following Windows error:

"Windows cannot find 'www.example.com'. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again."

Turns out this error is due to a Firefox 2.x bug.  Now I am not sure if it happens on 3.x (which I am running, but it is certainly something you can face on 2.x).

The fix involves a registry hack, but if you have any technical knowledge you can do it pretty easily.

View the fix.

If you are a .NET developer you've faced the issues I've faced when using a major search engine... results that don't really fit your problem.

But Google has an interesting feature that allows you to create a custom search engine.  You define the sites it searches. 

Dan Appleman has put together a site www.searchdotnet.com that searches his list of .NET sites and overall the results I get from this site are pretty good.

It has been an interesting week for me.

Started off with an old coworker IM'ing me and asking if I'd be a reference for a job he was interviewing on.  I certainly said yes, and last word I got is that he got the job.  The email I sent in reply to the email looking for feedback was a glowing recommendation for somebody who is a very skilled developer, and my first mentor in the trade.  Its good to be able to give back to him at times.

Then I was tasked with tech interviewing a candidate for a job at my employer.  First real interview I've had to do.  Was fun. In the end I love programming and talking about programming is pretty fun as well.

Next I was talking to a dad of one of my daughters friends.  He was recently back from a 10 month tour in Iraq.  He is a true, decorated war hero.  But now he has to reintegrate back into the real world.  Part of that is him wanting to get an IT job in the area.  He is interested in a newbie position, but some of his skills are a bit above that as well.  He has secret security clearance.  He'd be good for any company that needs general IT help (server setup, maintenance, deployment, help desk related work).  So if you work for a company that could honor one of our war hero's AND get a new worker at the same time... let me know and we can talk.  I have his resume on hand.

Finally came the most interesting part of the week.  We needed another .NET developer (we had hired the one I interviewed previously) for my employer and I recommended a former co-worker whom I helped train in what was nice and  good about programming.  This is a guy who at one point thought x was a valid variable name.... still can't believe that first code I saw from him... From what I can tell salary arrangements have been agreed on and if the owners of the company approve, me and this fellow will be co-workers once again. 

This final guy is one where I put my reputation on the line for him.  I am very tight lipped about my recommendations.  There are just four guys who would get my unequivocal recommendation.  There are many others who would get a recommendation on their work ethic, ability to learn, etc... but just four who I would recommend for ANY job they were going for.  He is one of them.

Recently I was working on a project that required me to unzip a file and process its contents.

But I needed to first figure out how to unzip a file.  To the rescue came the SharpZipLib.  This is under the GPL but is specifically released for personal and commercial use.

In my very basic use it worked like a champ.

Just before I went on vacation I had an interesting issue at work.

I was trying to multiple an int by a decimal.  Nothing big, but I kept getting this error:

Operator '*' cannot be applied to operands of type 'decimal'

I was floored, what do you mean I can't multiply a decimal in .NET?  What in the world are you talking about?

So after a brief search I found the fix.

Basically I had to add an M to the decimal.  So instead of:

4 * .95

I needed:

4 * .95M

Honestly still don't understand WHY Microsoft would think this is required, but they do. 

Hope this helps you as it helped me.

HT: Asp.net

I recently ran across this post and loved it!  I do some image creation stuff and the hardest part of my task is picking a font.  Now I can print out my installed fonts and quickly pick one out.

Now here is the guys code, but slightly edited.  As his had a few syntax errors in it. 

try

{

    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

    foreach (FontFamily family in FontFamily.Families)

    {

    sb.Append("<h2 style='color:blue;font-family:Arial;'>" + family.Name + "</h2>");

    sb.Append("<font face='" + family.Name + "' size='6'>");

    sb.Append("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890");

    sb.Append("</font><hr/>");

    sb.Append(Environment.NewLine);

    }

    lblFontList.Text = sb.ToString();

}

catch (Exception ex)

{

    lblErrorMessage.Text = ex.ToString();

}

I'm on vacation and the wireless internet access I have is restricted by MAC address.  I initially signed up on my personal PC (not knowing it was MAC address restricted) but needed access on my work PC.

So I went looking for information on masking my MAC address on my work PC to match my personal PC.  Led me to look into the advanced properties of the wireless card, and I found the answer.

As an FYI I have a Dell Wireless 1490 Dual Band WLAN Mini-Card installed.

Step 1:  Go to the device manager (if you don't know how to do this, you don't need to be doing any of this).

Step 2: Expand Network Adapters, Right click your wireless card and click properties.

Step 3: At the next window go to the Advanced Tab and select the "Locally Administered MAC Address"

Step 4: Enter in the value field your custom MAC address, and there is how you do it.

Was pretty happy to find it this easy.

So I am in the process of transferring my church 's website from www.bataviachurch.org to www.lifestreamcc.org since we changed our name on June 1st.

Along with this change it was required of me to get a new FeedBurner link for our sermons since I had 'BataviaChurchOfChristSermons' originally.

I figured I'd give a few simple names a try first.... and you won't believe what worked.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/streamingsermons

Thats it!  I was stunned that out of 1.7 million feeds that this wasn't already taken.  But it wasn't!

Very cool.